THE SIEVE OF COMMON SENSE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 268, 7 August 1943, Page 4

THE SIEVE OF COMMON SENSE

During the period of electioneering which lies immediately ahead the public (the electors) will have an opportunity it has not enjoyed since 1938 of applying the logic of common sense in sifting out the rubbish from the political and economic litter that has accumulated over that period. Among this litter is an assortment of glib phraseology that has passed into the currency of present-day political and economic language. Many of those who have adopted it would be hard put to it to reduce some of the phrases used to simple concrete terms. Intelligent people who use their reasoning faculties m the exercise of a discriminating judgment must often feel impatient at the amount of rigmarole and jargon foisted upon the general public in the discussion of political, economic, and social problems., but i is only at rare intervals that some member of this silent critical section is stung into open protest as was Mr. G. L. Schwartz in the. May teenth Century when he vented his feelings in a short article entitled “Economic Gibberish.” . . , After an introductory reference to “the welter of muddled politica thinking which prevailed before the war,” be applies his dissecting knife to some of the phrases now in use to obscure the absence o practical constructive thinking upon the problems of the tunes and those that lie ahead. “Balanced,” he observes, is an operative word with these phrase-mongers. “They are continually caLing,. he sajs, “for a balanced order, a balanced economy, a balanced agriculture, a balanced distribution of the population, under the firm impression tia, this statement of the problem is equivalent to a. solution of it. . . • These phrases have a familiar ring in this country, lake the pirasc, “orderly marketing,” coined by the policy-framers of the present Government: is there any department of Government administration whose activities have caused more publicly-expressed irritation., frustration and dissatisfaction than the Internal Marketing Division to which was entrusted the task of giving that particular phrase concrete practical meaning and method? Among a number of phrases in the mumbo-jumbo of economic planners the author of “Economic Gibberish” qites “the regulation of all industries producing the necessities of life as public utilities providing standard services at equitable charges and yielding a tan return to prudently-invested capital.” The public is left to puzzle ovei the precise meaning of “standard,” “equitable. fair, prudentlyinvested.” and so forth. There is also the proposition, garbed in similar obscure terms, that “the several basic industries of the nation should be so organized in the interests of the general public as to control production within the limits of a proper balance with an expanding power of consumption.” . This reference to the very timely article under mention may be appropriately concluded with the author’s final salvo: “In 1930, he relates, “the British Board of Film Censors was confronted with an exotic surrealist film. ‘lt must be suppressed,’ they reported, 'because it is so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is any meaning to it, it is doubtless objectionable.’” This statement seemed to the writer “to provide an admirable verdict on the economic aspect of all the charters, pronounciamentos, manifestos, blueprints, bulls, decretals, ukases, and firmans which are now descending upon us like the plague. They arc so cryptic as to be almost meaningless.”